For those who use Slack at work, you’ve doubtless observed that the variety of channels you’re invited to proliferates incessantly.
David Sacks, one-quarter of the favored All In podcast and a famend serial entrepreneur whose previous firms embrace Yammer — an worker chat startup that bought to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012 — says he can remedy this downside. Towards that finish, he teamed up with Evan Owen, previously the VP of engineering at a collaboration app, Zinc, that ServiceMax acquired in 2019.
The 2 of them have created Glue, an worker chat app that they are saying will repair what they name “Slack channel fatigue.” Glue, which emerged from stealth on Tuesday, is designed round topic-based threads and makes use of GenAI.
Craft Ventures, the VC agency that Sacks based, incubated and funded the corporate by way of a number of seed rounds. Glue was born in 2021 when Sacks and Owen, then an entrepreneur-in-residence at Craft, determined they every had many concepts about enhancing office messaging, and the house was due for an replace.
“Our view was that there’s nonetheless a whole lot of room for innovation,” stated Sacks, who’s Glue’s co-founder and chairman. “For those who speak to individuals about Slack, despite the fact that it’s product, they really feel like channels are actually noisy, and it’s quite a bit to maintain up with.”
On Slack, discussions occur in particular channels. This implies anybody who needs to talk with a bunch, even for a brief message, wants to hitch that channel. Nevertheless, since most individuals keep subscribed to channels they not often use, it might really feel like everybody within the firm is on each single channel, which could be overwhelming.
Glue arranges all communication into threads. A person or a workforce can begin a thread, and different groups and even Glue’s AI bot could be invited to hitch it.
In some ways, Glue’s interface seems just like Slack’s, however all the pieces a consumer sees on their display is meant particularly for them.
“You possibly can create a thread for a selected brief process,” stated Owen, Glue’s co-founder and CEO. “It’s an ephemeral dialog, and while you’re accomplished with it, it might go away.”
An worker can archive the dialog, and if they’re talked about once more, the chat will pop up once more, he stated.
Whereas organizing work messaging in threads as an alternative of channels might really feel like a throw-back resolution to decreasing communication litter, Sacks stated he’s positive that that is one thing Slack and its primary different, Microsoft Groups, can’t simply replicate.
“In an effort to copy what we’ve accomplished, they must fully re-architect the best way the entire product works,” he stated.
If this sounds vaguely acquainted, that might be as a result of Yammer (which has roughly morphed right into a product known as Microsoft Viva, though Microsoft Groups additionally permits workers to talk, along with do workforce video calls), was a thread-based chat as nicely. Yammer regarded just like Fb.
However Glue gave Sacks and Owen an opportunity to recreate thread-based chats within the age of AI. So, like most startups now, Glue is incorporating AI into its product.
“We made AI right into a digital worker in your workforce who can enter the chat at any time,” Sacks stated.
Sacks believes that AI inside an organization’s inside communication platform could be very highly effective.
“Typically you’ll begin a chat along with your co-workers after which understand you want AI to leap in and reply a query. So, you need your AI chat to be in the identical place as your human chat,” he stated. “It doesn’t make sense to ship customers out elsewhere to talk with the AI after which have their form of human chats on another app.”
Whereas Glue AI’s position will evolve as underlying LLMs enhance, Sacks stated there are already some issues the bot can do with a sure degree of precision. Glue AI can counsel subject names for every thread, summarize conversations throughout a span of time and determine sure details about workers based mostly on their chat historical past, corresponding to what’s their position throughout the firm.
Glue AI could be powered by ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude AI. Customers can toggle between the 2 fashions, or the system will mechanically select the better-performing LLM for them.
In fact, AI embedded into the company chat app isn’t distinctive to Glue. Slack additionally has an built-in AI, and naturally Microsoft has embedded its CoPilot AI into a lot of its apps, together with Microsoft Groups.
Craft Ventures has been utilizing Glue internally for a 12 months, and beginning Tuesday the product will likely be supplied to different firms.
After a three-month trial interval, Glue will cost $7 per worker monthly, which Sacks stated is barely lower than Slack’s pricing for a fundamental package deal.
Owen added that it’s a “killer deal” as a result of Slack fees between $15 to $18 to incorporate SlackGPT, the AI chatbot that Slack’s proprietor Salesforce introduced a 12 months in the past.
Glue isn’t the primary startup Sacks incubated in Craft Ventures. In the previous couple of years, Craft began Callin, a social podcasting app that later bought to Rumble for lower than the corporate raised in funding, Axios reported. Final 12 months, the enterprise agency launched SaaSGrid, a startup that retains observe of SaaS metrics.
Sacks hinted that Glue could also be prepared to lift its first exterior funding shortly after unveiling of the app.
“We need to launch and present individuals how superior the product is,” Sacks stated. “When you’ve got an incredible product within the AI house, you’ll be able to increase a Sequence An instantaneous.”
As for what valuation Craft hopes the corporate will appeal to, he stated, “You by no means actually know the place the valuation goes to land till you might have a course of.”
He’s been teasing the approaching of his new AI firm on All In, which he co-hosts with fellow buyers Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg, “Besties have been clamoring to take a position [in this],” he stated, referring to his All In co-hosts.
Provided that he’s positioning Glue as an AI firm, and possibly his besties do desire a piece, it’s clear he’s hoping for a excessive valuation.